Why Do So Many Companies Ignore Customer Marketing?

The next time you’re at your company’s town hall, pay attention to this:The amount of congrats on the new logos your Sales team generated vs. the time allocated to the 13 existing customers who renewed last quarter.

Chances are, it’s lopsided to say the least toward new sales.

Howard Flint, CEO of GhostPartner, a content and customer marketing agency, has a thing or 10 to say about that:

How customer marketing can not only keep customers happy but how it can uncover hidden problems.

How it's low work and high return. 

How to come up with ideas and create landing pages using AI. 

High Intent explores unfiltered lessons from the frontlines of modern marketing, hosted by Justin Rubner. 

If you like this content, do subscribe!

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

The next time you're at your company's town hall, pay attention to this. The amount of congrats on new logos your sales team generated versus the time allocated to the 13 existing customers who renewed last quarter. Chances are it's lopsided, to say the least, towards new customers. Even though reoccurring revenue in a subscription business particularly far outweighs the revenue generated by new customers. I'm Justin Rubner, host of High Intent, where we explore unfiltered lessons from the front lines of modern marketing. On today is Howard Flint, CEO of Ghost Partner, a content and customer marketing agency. He's going to share some tips and observations on customer marketing from his many years in the business. Let's get to it. Well, Howard, you are CEO of content agency Ghost Partner, and you've been doing that for a little over 18 years now. So welcome to High Inten. I'm really happy to have you, Howard. Thanks for having me, Justin. Yeah, absolutely. So you kind of got your start in newsletters. And is it safe to say now that the focus of your agency is customer marketing?

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Yes. Yeah, and all aspects of customer marketing. I mean, the newsletters is still viable. It's not sexy because it never was sexy, but it's still like a kind of a boring but necessary thing you should have in your business. And I don't think we've come full circle, but we've always been doing this. We do other digital services as well. But whenever we talk to a client, if they don't bring it up, we'll say, How are you talking to your current clients? How important is the renewal business and the referral business? Because not just to increase the invoice to the client, but we want to be involved in all aspects of growing the revenue. And so often customers or our customers, our clients miss the current person that's paying you an invoice every month and have you paid uh respect to them and communicated and kept that relationship going.

SPEAKER_02 2:14

So if I had to categorize some themes of content marketing for 2026, is it safe to say that AI and personalization are two big themes? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Absolutely. And I think one of the things that AI can help with, and not just we're gonna hand this off to AI, thank God we don't have to do it anymore. But I think AI is uh as it should be, it's there to supplement, to complement what we're doing. And it could certainly help with that personalization. I mean, if you were an e-commerce company and able to go through and say, not just thank Justin for his purchase, but mention that in the next regular newsletter that's personalized to Justin that says, Hey, we understand you, we get you. You you matter to us. People like to matter, they like to belong to something. But also there's an opportunity to say, you know, Justin, if you if you liked this, don't forget we also have this product. Because you're really doing three things is you're reminding that we're doing business. You and I are customers, or you're a customer of ours. We're doing business together. But there might be other places you didn't know we had a product for or service for, that there could be another opportunity if you say, Oh, I I didn't know you guys did that. I'm paying somebody else. I'm not very happy with them. I'd rather pay one invoice, that sort of thing. So I think AI could be used, it could be good at uh uncovering those situations where you don't have the time to think of all that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 3:42

What are some AI tools that you're using right now that you like?

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Well, we close little classic chat GPT. We think that's a great one. As long as you feed it in the right information, there's so many good GPTs, the little connections it has to other programs. If we have to modify a graphic, uh we just recently worked with a small jeweler in New York, and their photos were frankly fairly bland. It was a nice piece, but it was fairly bland. Being able to come into Chat GPT and and enhance that made the newsletter more attractive because it's not just you know a bauble or something like that. Now it's sitting on a satin pillow and the lighting is coming down. That right, that would have cost thousands of dollars in weeks instead of a photo shoot. And now, as long as it's that person's piece of jewelry, sorry, that's her idea.

SPEAKER_02 4:34

You're not creating it from scratch, you're enhancing it.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

We're enhancing it, and so we're making sure it's going out. I I think that's a great tool. We're starting to get into lovable as a tool to help us create landing pages or ideate on landing pages. We're very open to AI and really excited about some of the tools they bring forth.

SPEAKER_02 4:56

How has lovable uh helped you be more efficient?

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Well, we're new to it, but I think one of the things we get asked for. So if we're doing customer marketing, that's important. If there's a campaign or something that requires a landing page, right? That we don't want to send people just to the website and have to find things. We want a dedicated place for them to go. It's quick to go in and maybe create a prompt in ChatGPT, go to lovable and have it throw that together visually. And we can quickly show that to the client, and they can give us feedback at that point before we've spent too much time. Especially if we're pitching the idea of a landing page, which might, you know, be a charge for the client. I don't know, I don't know if we want to spend that money, but then you're able to show them look what this landing page could look like. Yeah, and AI can produce that quickly for you.

SPEAKER_02 5:50

I can't tell you how many landing pages I've been a part of for every single campaign, and you really need them. You can't be sending people to a generic page because they're gonna bounce. And having a way to produce those pages efficiently, I think is a great use of AI because it is it's not rocket science creating one of these. Uh, you just have to be focused and and short. You don't need 10 different modules on a landing page, you only need a you know two or three.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

Right. But in in the way of a human creating it, it still took a lot of time. Right. And again, I don't I'm not trying to replace people, but I'm trying to be more efficient and get this. If the client's interested now, let's get something in front of them so they can make a decision one way or another. Right.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

We're gonna focus a little bit on SaaS, but we could talk about other types of businesses too. But you know, in the SaaS subscription world, we always hear this stat that between 70 to 80 percent of revenue comes from recurring sales, i.e., existing customers, which is what we're talking about. 80 percent. Marketing departments are spending 80 plus percent of their budget on new logo generation. Yep. Do you think that this is smart?

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Well, I mean, it's always smart to be bringing new clients, right? I mean, that that has to be that's every if it whether you're self-funded or you've got VC behind you, everybody wants to know what that looks like and how efficient it is. And again, it's the unsexy part of it is keeping Justin paying his invoice, right? He may be on a three-year subscription, and so I could say he's with us. I don't have to talk to Justin anymore. But I think the happier you keep people, the less trouble you have. You also uncover, I think, a lot of problems, especially in the SaaS world. Justin's not really using it. And we didn't know that because we don't communicate with him, and he's having a problem with this one feature. And maybe if we could clean up that feature or do a better job of onboarding so people get over that hump, then they're really happy with it. The gold of the internet is still a testimony. And if you can find out in that customer marketing that Justin's really happy, do you know you guys save me four hours a month because of or we we cut down and you've unearthed it, and now you're gonna hand that over to the marketing department and they're gonna be like, oh, thank you for that chunk of gold, right?

SPEAKER_02 8:17

It's it's such a job getting uh finding customers to give you testimonials. Uh, I and it's so important because oh yeah. Prospects and customers, they don't want to listen to us blow the eight, right? They want to listen to their peers uh talk about why they like their product.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Right. And sometimes those things are are hidden and you've gotta be readings. I mean, you know, yeah, AI can be reading that and be on the lookout for those things, but I think that we always talk about three things that customer marketing does for you and that keep people buying from you, they increase what they buy from you because you're able to tell them other services, other features you have. And then the big one, they refer you to other customers. They are your marketing department, they're your evangelicals out there saying, Well, that's a great product. I really love that product. I mean, you can't pay for that, right? It's so valuable to have, and you check all three of those boxes with customer marketing.

SPEAKER_02 9:15

So we're gonna switch gears for a second. When we were talking, those of you not watching on YouTube, uh, Howard has a guitar in the background, and uh he told me he he plays in a band. So tell me about that.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

I play in a band called The Reflex, a tribute to Duran Duran. You can Google that or also yeah, the reflex.band. It came out of COVID. Some friends, we were we've always been musicians and always played, but uh, this was a fun project. We realized uh again in marketing terms, here was a product that didn't exist in the marketplace. There's a lot of bands for Journey and ACDC, and there wasn't one for this very popular band in the 80s and a band that still exists, still tours, it has a big following out there. And so we took the technology and put the right team together, right? Sounds like a business, and then created branding, you know, created a logo, created a branding kit, created all the outbound emails to to venues, uh, created story around it. Uh, so that was a fun thing from my marketing background to kind of merge that up with the music and create a product that venues want and get to sort of exercise a muscle doing a different thing. So it's that's been a lot of fun. I'm definitely gonna have to watch you play variety playhouse in June. Yeah, the next one's at the next time we're at Atlanta, June 26th.

SPEAKER_02 10:47

Yeah, well, well, let's get back to customer marketing, although you there's a nice segue into it. So I think retention is kind of a funny thing. We see B2C business to customer retention rates in the you know, in the around the 60, 70, 80 percent range, and B2B is often uh higher with enterprise SaaS often in the high 90s, with sometimes with some of these customers getting three year subscriptions. Why is customer marketing even worth it?

SPEAKER_01 11:18

I I think first of all, it's cheap. Right? So it's not a big line item that that you have to convince budget to do. It has a probably a 4x return on it. It whatever's in your CRM, or maybe you have a constant contact or a MailChimp account. It doesn't take much to do. AI can assist in writing the content every month. You know, you can create your own editorial calendar from based on your existing materials. And, you know, you make it somebody's to-do, you know, it doesn't have to be a uh a C level person that's writing it, but making sure that it gets done. And I think that the the payoff of keeping people engaged. Sometimes you need to remind people, you know, there's lots of I think about this every time I hear these ads, these are a sort of a B2C product. And I think it's rocket money that promotes, let's look at your checking account and look for subscriptions you don't know you're paying for.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:20

Right. And that's going after the I've got two Netflix subscriptions or two Apple Music or something. But that's got to make enterprise think, yeah, what are we paying for that we're not using? Right. And you don't want somebody going through that list and go, are we still paying for this? You want someone to say, yeah, and here's why we pay for it, because it does this thing every month for us. Yeah. You know, you want to still be important. And I think that's what customer marketing says. Yeah, yeah. I I see that even if it's I just see that logo come into my inbox, I remind me, yeah, it's right. That's that thing that does that one thing every month. It's not a big deal, but it's an important part.

SPEAKER_02 12:58

It's a touch point where that you wouldn't get otherwise.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 13:01

Yeah. So in in the software business, we're told that often told this that the first you know, few months, three, four months, are the most important from not only a marketing perspective, but customer success and product. Uh and that's because most customers are most susceptible to learning about uh features and benefits. And then after that, and I see this, it's so much harder to get their attention, you know, conversions and and uh open rates and whatnot. Right. Uh and if you don't, you probably run the risk of lower usage of certain features, which obviously will have a much higher chance on churn. Do you see this dynamic at all with your customers?

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Yeah, I think that those first few months, I like to emphasize the onboarding process, right? The the better you can onboard the the more someone will use it, right? And that and those are your first few months. It also uncovers problems that you may need to go back to you know to the the team and say, people don't like this feature, or this is really hard to do. Can we clean this up? Can we do something? And that ultimately improves everything down the line. But that onboarding is where a lot of that's where you're gonna spend a lot of your money, right? We've just acquired you as a customer. We're gonna spend some money making sure you're up and running and using it. Because now, yes, we're gonna keep customer marketing, we're gonna keep communicating with you, but we can know with some confidence you're gonna use it, right? And that you're gonna get your value out of it. Because that's the big thing is that you have to, as the provider of the service, show your value every month. Whether every month someone puts a number to it or not, and somebody's probably evaluating the value of it, right? Back to the B2C world. Is there anything on Netflix right now? Is there a show on Netflix? Do we need Netflix? Is it really you know what I mean? That's where you have to be. And I think the customer marketing says, you know, don't forget we're the thing in your accounting program that does this one task every month that saves you four hours and four hours a day, whatever it is. You just get to remind it. So I think I think the churn new logo generation is sexy, right? That's what everybody, that's the top of the meeting, but somewhere in there it's gonna be a churn, and you don't want to be the person they look at and go, how come we're losing people?

SPEAKER_02 15:28

I really wish that in QBRs and and town hall meetings and whatnot, we celebrated customers when they re-subscribe. Oh, yeah. It's all about the new logos, right? And obviously it's important. And as a marketer, yeah, I I contributed to that, but we don't give the same uh hurrah to the customer success team or other customer service teams that were influential and making sure that that customer uh re-upped for a year or two or even three.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

Yep, yeah, absolutely. No, I you're absolutely right. There should be a slide in the deck with Justin's face going across, renewed for another three years. I think that there is a fear, and I'm not saying it's not founded, that if I remind you that you renewed, you might be like, Oh, yeah, I didn't want to do that. I did remind me right, I did. Because if you're working at enterprise, you you're one of many, many, many, many pieces of software that they're subscribing to. And I and again, that's not unfounded, it happens, and you don't want to be responsible for people unsubscribing because you reminded them to subscribe. That's not necessarily a great way to do business. You you ought to have people that want to do it. But I think if you're doing customer marketing right the whole way along, that renewal is legitimate, and that renewal is celebratable.

SPEAKER_02 16:53

How would you do uh customer marketing for a small business like a jeweler, which you mentioned before, versus a subscription business? What would be some customer marketing ideas for a company like a jeweler or other smaller uh merchant style businesses?

SPEAKER_01 17:11

So I think we may have talked about this before. My wife owns a bakery in Roswell, Georgia. So it's uh just a small local bakery, and and uh so she gets a marketing department with it, right? And so we're her husband. Her husband, yes. Uh her free marketing department. Sometimes I wish we did better because it's a retail business. We don't do a lot of retail, but so it's been a learning experience for us. But emails go out, cash register rings, and that cash register sometimes is the e-commerce. It happens every time, and that's because she in her business, anyway, it's here's new products. So that could be a jewelry, that could be athletic shoes, whatever it is, but here's a new product, right? We have a new cookie, or it is Valentine's Day, or something like that. And I think that that's what people, even though they'd say, well, everybody knows us, they know we're a baker, they know we're here, do they? Yeah, do that, do they know every day? I mean, again, you're that's the balance of don't bombard them, watch the burn rate, you don't kill the list. But you also want that customer that says, Oh, I'm so glad you told me that you guys have heart cookies that I can come in and get the name of my kids on. I forgot about that, right? People are busy, they forget. So I think that's more of a uh retail customer. I think that's an important thing, is just to remind people don't bombard. I think that's where you share stories too, right? The one of the ways we talk about case studies all the time is that what you and I as business owners can't do is we can't talk about ourselves, right? Because it falls on that, I don't want to hear one more guy talk about himself. But if I can come up and say, Oh, we worked with Amy and her jewelry e-commerce in New York, and these are the problems that she had, we suggested this solved the problem. And then the end of the arc is Amy saying, Boy, the team of ghost partner, that was a really great idea. And I sold a $2,000 necklace after we did that thing. That's a story about me ultimately and my company, but I didn't have to say me, me, me in it. Right. And so case studies are a great way of doing that.

SPEAKER_02 19:16

Yep, absolutely. Which gets us into coming up with content ideas, i.e., editorial, for resource strap marketing departments that are have very, very rigorous pipeline and revenue goals. Yep. And you may not be employing full-time journalists to come up with ideas all the time. Right. What are some ways to come up with fresh ideas on the regular for all types of businesses? Because you know, sometimes it's like, how can I come up with business ideas for accounting? You know, it's not the sexiest thing ever or or whatever. Where do you recommend marketers who are resource strapped to come up with their content ideas?

SPEAKER_01 20:03

Now to be a broke record about it, but AI is a great tool for this. And and not because not because AI is going to create the idea, it's going to organize the idea for you. Right. If you've got a support department and you can look at the tickets coming in, for example, and you can feed the last few weeks, depending on your size, of tickets, of like people reaching out and saying, This doesn't work. I wish I knew how do I do this. That would might say, you know, here's some idea. This seems to be a common problem. Let's address this. Yeah. It could be the success stories, those stories of people leaving you good reviews and negative and positive. Negative and positive.

SPEAKER_02 20:41

Yeah, you'll give you it'll give you ideas to address proactively in your content marketing.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

Absolutely. So there's a lot of those things, and I think that's the nice thing about AI is say, throw me 12 ideas, mix them up between those things. Mention, you know, maybe you've got a customer that does did renew and is very happy and wants to talk about it. And you can reach out and they'll give you an idea. I think that you probably have too many ideas, but the nice thing about AI is keep a thread going and it's going to it can categorize. There's nothing worse in the writing business than a blank piece of paper, right? As you sit down there and go, I don't know what I'm going to do. But that's what AI is really good at is saying, here's 12 ideas. 10 of them weren't that great, but those let's break, let's break those two down into something, um, and watch your responses, watch your feedback and go out. So I I think that's I hate to say a low-level person, but you could put somebody on that job who can come forth with enough ideas. You know, if the team needs to vote on it and then flush out that idea. A customer newsletter should not be very long. Right. It might even be, and this breaks an old rule we used to have, which was always send them back to the website, which there should be links to the website. But maybe the thing is, is it it's I can read it all on my phone.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

I agree.

unknown 22:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Right?

SPEAKER_02 22:01

It's I think that's an old way of thinking is our primary goal is a click-through rate. I don't think that's the model anymore.

SPEAKER_01 22:09

Back to your new logo generation. I think the sales team, that's their metric. How many click-throughs do how many human click-throughs do you get? I think for the customer marketing, it might be we gave them something so short and sweet that they could read in their phone and say, you know, I like that company. Right? I'm glad I give them a hundred bucks every month because that fit my lifestyle of looking at my phone.

SPEAKER_02 22:34

Well, we're obviously talking a lot about email, but what other channels are we talking about here in customer marketing?

SPEAKER_01 22:40

Yeah, I think social media should also be a place you put this content. I don't know that it's as much as it used to be, but you supposedly the promise of social media, ah, so long ago, was that you would have email lists of your customers that you had permission to send to, but then you'd have a lot of your people that would follow you. Now we know not all of the people that follow you see your content that doesn't happen as much anymore, but I think it needs to go out there. But I thank you, LinkedIn. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Right. It could be showing people who are not customers of yours how you treat your customers and says, this is how we talk to our customers. Oh, those people are constantly communicating with the customers. They're really good at that. And I and I think it gives people a peek inside what it's like to be a customer of yours to buy your product. And that's all I think that's always a good thing. Especially if someone's honest and saying, you know, we've gotten a couple complaints about this feature, and we hear you, and we're fixing it. So I don't do that judiciously, but I I don't think that's a bad thing. I think people these days do respect candor, especially if someone and not enough people maybe do this, step up and say, Yeah, we did that wrong, and we're gonna fix it. Because I think Corey Doctrow, the the author, uh, and I don't know if I can use this word, and you you'll have to edit out in the in shidification of technology, which is his word that it just you got into something, it seemed wonderful, Facebook, and and then it just got bad. Yeah. Right? Someone said the algorithm should now do this, and now I don't see as many things. So I think that customer marketing hopefully keeps you from inshidifying your product because you're still a human product, you're still a human team talking to your people.

SPEAKER_02 24:32

I think you're allowed two S bombs per show. Okay, good.

SPEAKER_01 24:35

I I'm I'm okay, okay.

SPEAKER_02 24:38

What do companies get wrong about customer marketing of all sizes?

SPEAKER_01 24:42

They don't do it. They don't do it, they don't do it. That's the easy one. As I say, when we talk to customers and and do and offer customer marketing, or maybe they brought us on to do that, we don't do it because we can do it, we do it because we do do it, and you can do it too, but you don't. And so at that point, it it makes sense to outsource that business because they honestly are just are lean, and if so, hopefully they know it's important, but it's worth doing. And frankly, it's an affordable thing, right? It's a thing that's not super expensive, it's not the the outbound lead generation that can get very expensive, and so so someone's constantly quantifying it. Sure, but you know, you do customer marketing, right? You're still on the same platforms, you can see people coming back in, you can see people reading, you can see people buying another product, you can see people renewing. And so I think that there's a quantifiable thing, but I think the numbers are low enough that it's not gonna get everybody uptight about what it is, but it's an important thing you need to do.

SPEAKER_02 25:49

Sure. You know, one thing we haven't talked about is webinars. I'm I'm a big fan of webinars for customers. Uh, do you want to talk a little bit about that and and what successes you've seen with them and and whatnot?

SPEAKER_01 26:01

We don't do that many, but I'm also a fan, especially if I'm with a product that I like, I'll attend it if I've got the time it could fit it in. Because I do a lot of this, right? The at the desk in front of a screen. Because I think it's first of all, it's a great way to humanize your business, right? Here's the person that I've seen his emails, I see his name everywhere, but here's his face.

SPEAKER_02 26:23

Here's the product person, the customer success person, whoever. Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:27

Yeah. After all this technology, Justin, we still like doing business with people and we feel better about it, especially in the world of AI. I think people would look at me and say, that guy's not AI generated. AI would have done a better job. So I think that's a real person. But I think that's a great way to take all the feedback you've gotten, all the work you've done on custom marketing and say, we hear you and we want to talk about this new feature. Or we understand everyone's having a problem with this thing, and let's talk about it. And let's more than talk about it, let's show you how it works. I love when someone puts their screen up there and say, You go here, you go here, oh, that's where that thing is, right? On a product that has tons of features, you're like, where did you guys hide that thing?

SPEAKER_02 27:08

Right.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

Right. And to see that on there rather than me digging through a bunch of YouTube videos, and I know I'm not gonna do that. Right, right. But that webinar then makes content instantly, yeah, instantly, that you can sort of cut up and you can share in your next hey, you missed our webinar, but customer Justin had a really good question and we addressed it. Here's how we addressed it, right? It's a snippet, it looks good on a phone, and boom, you're creating more content. That's always a win.

SPEAKER_02 27:41

Yeah. Well, you make your business through outsourcing, uh, obviously. Yeah, but if you were working at a at a at a corporation again, and let's say you're a you know, you have a mid-sized marketing team, how would you add customer marketing into the mix? And who would you have do it? Would you have a an individual or individuals focusing on that? I'm thinking you may say no, but uh tell me a little bit about your idea of what a good marketing structure would be for a medium-sized marketing team.

SPEAKER_01 28:08

It's been a while since I've been with uh the real company. So these things are they they uh they run differently these days. There's whole floors of 20-year-olds that are doing things. Important things, don't get me wrong. First of all, that I'm a big advocate of customer marketing, but I at least act like I know my place, right? New logo generation, they're gonna get the top spot, they're gonna get the champagne toasts, and I get that. But I think that customer marketing can be a part of the regular meeting. Guys, these are subjects we're talking about. Does anybody have any input? Anything they've heard that they think the customers we should talk about. So it keeps woven in there. I don't want to make it something where 10 people have to sign off because that's a sure fire way to get something not to happen. Because if you're already a low priority, right? They'll never get they'll never get done. Everybody bastardized, absolutely. Customer marketing should not be controversial in any way, right? We can take some chances with new marketing out there and be bold, but I think I don't want to be boring by any means, but I want to be steady. Sure. I want to be the steady thing that drumbeats the company message, right? Oh, you what you should be known for the problem that you solve, right? As any company. And so we're constantly reaffirming that with our customers. Don't forget, we solve this problem for you because people pay all day long to have their problems solved, and they're constantly thinking about their problems. So when you're there saying, don't forget that one time in your program, this number doesn't go to here, and that's what our pro that's what our solution is. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's why it's worth X number of dollars a month, and I can't get rid of it. Right. And I need to do it. So my advice after all that was keep it very simple, but make sure everybody gets a chance to have some input. If someone says, you know, customers don't know, oh, I do want to know what customers don't know because we should have that in there. But make sure it's steady. So when people say, What's up with customer marketing, I'm like, second Tuesday of every month, check it out. It comes out second Tuesday of every month. Right. You know what I mean? And then, and then that's the thing they know about you internally, is you're the thing that happens on time every week.

SPEAKER_02 30:26

I love that. I love the steady uh aspect uh of all that. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:32

All right. Well, we talked about internal teams. What recommendations do you have for you for a company that is considering outsourcing its customer marketing?

SPEAKER_01 30:41

To speak honestly to another person in the business, it's really difficult because if it's not a high priority of the company, we are chasing people. If someone's asking me why is Ghost Partner charging us X amount, I'll have to say a lot of what we do is chase you. Right? It's part of it's creation, part of it's the stuff we do. But we're we're looking for someone in that if we're the external, the outsource team, we're trying to get some people to approve things, right? And so that is a difficult part of what we do, and that's the dangerous part of what we do, right? Because if you're too much of a pain in the ass too often, they're like, why are we paying for this? Was it that important? And so if Justin is my client, I'm gonna try to get his attention kind of one time and give me a lot of approval so I can get a few months' worth of work done, right? So I'm not constantly going in and say, Okay, February newsletter, Justin, give me your feedback. I want to try to get February, March, April done. Yeah, right. So I can come off, I could do all the work we talked about. Uh, we're a learning curve. So as we stay with you longer and longer, we're better at knowing what you will approve.

SPEAKER_02 31:57

I think that's good advice. I uh think back to managing a marketing team and the idea of knowing what we're gonna write about three months in advance with the way things change so much feels pretty daunting for me. Uh uh, but thinking ahead is definitely gonna help an outsource partner like you. Do you recommend having just one point of contact?

SPEAKER_01 32:21

Boy, that'd be great. Does that happen? Not not often. Or the one point of contact will say, Okay, but I gotta go check to three people. All right. So I don't have one point of contact, do I?

SPEAKER_00 32:32

Right.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

So I and I think it also, especially in the early phases, and the early phases of any relationship are super important, right? And we just did this with a uh a client. We have an auto insurance provider, and we're writing some content, and we we shot them an idea for the newsletter. We said we're gonna write about this. And I said, Hey, you know, that's really good, except this one thing you said isn't actually true about us. It's actually this thing. We're like, we just learned something.

SPEAKER_00 32:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

And which we will then go put into our Chat GPT channel so that it forever remembers that's a thing, right? So if we ever go back and make the mistake of saying, you know, don't forget we're this, chat's gonna say, I think the client told you they're not that. They said it's kind of it's it's another way because we're humans and we're in I may have somebody different doing it six months from now or a year from here. Yeah. And that's the beauty of the institutional knowledge that don't get me going, but now we're on a platform that could be kept from us in the future, right? Or now they've doubled the price of it. But anyway, but that institutional knowledge is a good place to have, so that you're always writing better and better stuff. Because the more the client goes, yeah, you got it. You totally get it. We nailed it, yeah. Yeah. And so now, as their customer, they're gonna renew because they're like, Oh, those guys, why would I ever get rid of that? You know, then I got to start off with some other guy that doesn't understand and has to learn it all. That's how it's from our viewpoint, that's one of the ways we try to be sticky, right? You want to be sticky as a outside company and them go, ah, it's it's really too much of a pain in the neck to get rid of ghost partner to replace ghost partner because they know all this stuff. They're already in rhythm with us. Why would we do that? Maybe they can improve some stuff and we'll ask them to do some stuff differently, but we we want to stick around.

SPEAKER_02 34:26

Howard, I'll I'll tell you from experience from the client side, and I know it's gotta be frustrating to be looking for direction or approvals, whatever, and it just takes forever and you can't get the right person. I will say from a client side, and I've experimented with different ways, but of getting the right people in on the review process is harder than it appears. Yeah, because you can easily have someone who is way too in the weeds and analytical, yeah uh looking at your stuff and and not looking at it the right way. And and you can have other people who are going to be critical of every little thing, and you can't have that. And you need to have the right internal partners with the right knowledge reviewing your stuff. And it's very important you have to have that collaboration because as marketers, we're not product experts, and we hopefully we know the customers very well, uh, and we should, uh, but we don't know the customers as well as a customer service or customer success type. So getting that right approval process and not even approval, just opinion, right? Sometimes like it's tough because you can get a lot of people making things more complicated than it that it has to be. At the same time, you also run the risk of potentially putting something out that's not contextually accurate. So it's it's a bit of a challenge and it takes some experimentation from the client side for sure.

SPEAKER_01 35:52

And this is the balancing act is you don't want to put something that's so bland and boring that people just become they're like, I'm not gonna read that newsletter, right? It's a crappy newsletter. And you also have to imagine again, depending on the size of the client, you may be working with sort of the mid-level team putting stuff out, but then C level people are seeing their own emails and go, Why did we say that? Who approved that, right? Right, yeah, you better want to hear that. Yeah, you're like, Well, Justin said he said that was what we should do. Don't play on me, Howard. Right. I never want to mix up simple and easy, right? Right. A customer marketing should be simple, right? We can show you the things, we go, but it's not easy, it still has to be done every time. Somebody has to do it, somebody has to sign off. And people hate to risk. The more risk we can mitigate for the client to say this is a good newsletter to put out, this is a good piece of information to put out. That makes everybody more comfortable. And the more comfortable they are, the more apt they are to repeat it and renew your contract as well.

SPEAKER_02 36:57

Absolutely. All right, well, let's uh let's end this with uh your uh with a good parting tip.

SPEAKER_01 37:05

Parting tip customer marketing, that's obvious. I've I've been around for a while and I still like to stay up on the new stuff. I don't want to get too distracted with because there's so much new stuff, right? There's a new AI blank company every week. But I do think that it's good when technology is democratized and gets handed to people. I think clever things can happen. And so I think it's good to stay on top of these things. Again, I don't I'm not big on replacing people. Everybody thought, right, our business, as soon as AI came across, oh, you content marketers are gone now, right? This is it. And I'm like, I don't know. That that really made us more efficient. We're able to do better work for our clients now. We're able to scale things we couldn't scale before. So bring it on. I mean, we'll take the AI tools, they got to be good. We have to always be checking the work. Sure. So I think the tip is stay up on your technology, but also still be good at talking to human beings, you know, and make sure you're if you can, if you have the luxury of going to conferences, go to conferences, be a person that they see and know and get on enough Zoom calls and and stay connected to people. I think that's never gonna go out, but I think increasingly that's a more valuable commodity is the person who can show up and shake a hand and talk knowledgeably and like you, Justin, as somebody that is good to know and and can speak knowledgeably of something and is you know it's a benefit to know you.

SPEAKER_02 38:46

Well, you too, Howard, and uh I love that tip, by the way. And uh thanks so much for being on High Intent. And uh people could find your website at ghostpartner.com.

SPEAKER_01 38:56

Ghostpartner.com. We're always there.

SPEAKER_02 38:58

All right, cool. Well, thanks again for being on.

SPEAKER_01 38:59

Yep, thank you very much. All right.